The Food Pyramid Is Wrong and We Need to Stop Teaching It in School

How often have you seen the “food pyramid”? Probably your whole life. You’ve seen it in school. You’ve seen it at doctor’s offices. You’ve seen it on cereal boxes. The food pyramid has become almost ubiquitous in our daily lives.

For as long as most of us can remember, the food pyramid has guided traditional wisdom about meal choices. If you are like me, you can remember the general idea by heart: You should eat mostly grains, followed by vegetables, fruit, meat, dairy, and fats, in that order.

Would it surprise you to learn that the food pyramid was inaccurate? Because it is.

This isn’t some conspiracy theory or anything either. It is a well-documented fact. The USDA had nutritional experts craft a food pyramid. The original version that they came back with featured fruits and vegetables as the biggest and most important food groups. That version was overturned and edited into the final product that we are all familiar with today.

“When our version of the Food Guide came back to us revised, we were shocked to find that it was vastly different from the one we had developed. As I later discovered, the wholesale changes made to the guide by the Office of the Secretary of Agriculture were calculated to win the acceptance of the food industry. For instance, the Ag Secretary’s office altered wording to emphasize processed foods over fresh and whole foods, to downplay lean meats and low-fat dairy choices because the meat and milk lobbies believed it’d hurt sales of full-fat products; it also hugely increased the servings of wheat and other grains to make the wheat growers happy…”

So, if the food pyramid is problematic and we know it, why do I still see it in lunchrooms all across the country? Why do they still put it in publications meant for children? And why do teachers continue to show and teach it to students in school?

This is hardly surprising. Half the textbooks in my class have not fully accounted for the fall of the Soviet Union. However, it falls upon us as teachers to give students accurate information. Especially when it comes to their health.

I am challenging you to teach your kids the correct foods to eat in spite of years of inaccurate and misleading information. The appropriate information is out there. Don’t depend on the USDA or any other entity with an agenda to teach our students accurate information about their health.